Chapter 3
By the time the kettle had begun to murmur on the stove, Jodie had a fire going in the front room.
She had placed a clean sheet on the cot from the back porch and set a basin of warm water on the little three-legged table she had pulled close to the bed.
She moved through the rooms, waddling as she went.
The kitchen smelled of woodsmoke, peppermint, and, faintly, of the vegetable soup she had made for supper, which now sat forgotten and cooling on the back of the stove.
She heard her father and Eli before she saw them—the heavy double tread of two men carrying a third, the small grunts of effort, and the brief, sharp instruction from David telling Eli to mind the door frame and not to knock the man’s head.
She crossed quickly into the front room and held the door wide.
“Lay him on the cot. Eli, take his boots off. They are wet through,” Jodie instructed them.
“Yah, Jodie.”
They lowered the stranger onto the cot, awkwardly managing to avoid hitting his head again.
Jodie watched from the other side of the room.
He was much taller than the cot, and his stockinged feet, after Eli pulled the boots free, hung off the end.
His coat was soaked through on one side, and his hair was covered with bits of dead leaf and oak bark.
He had not stirred once while they moved him, which Jodie found both a small mercy and a quiet worry.
David straightened up and looked at her, and she saw the question on his face before he asked it.
“I know,” she said before he could speak. “I know wat you are going to say. He could be anyone. He could have come from any kind of trouble. We do not know him.”
“Yah, all of those things are true.”
“Yah, Daed. They are, and he is a man who would have died in our ditch tonight if we’d left him out there. I am not prepared to be the frau who sends an unconscious stranger back into the kald while there is a fire in our front room and a clean cot to lay him on.”
David folded his arms across his chest. He had a way of standing when he disapproved of something he could not, in good conscience, refuse—his weight back on his heels, his jaw set a little tighter than usual, and his eyes fixed on a point on the wall just beyond the person he was disagreeing with.
Jodie had seen that pose for twenty-five years.
“Dochder, you are expecting a boppli,” he said. “You cannot be sitting up nights tending to strangers.”
“I am not asking to do it alone.”
“Jodie —”
“Daed.” She set the basin of water down on the little table with a deliberate little clunk and turned to face him. “What would Mamm have done?”
It was, she knew, an unfair question. It was also the only question she had ever found that reliably worked on him.
David Graber had been widowed for twelve years, and in those twelve years he had built many defenses against many things, but he had never, so far as Jodie knew, built one against the memory of his wife.
He looked at the fire for a moment, then at the stranger lying senseless on the cot.
Then he looked back at his daughter, and the corner of his mouth curved into a small, unwilling smile.
“Ach, she would have made soup,” he said.
“Well, we have soup. There is already broth in the pot. We will watch him through the night, the two of us taking turns, and in the morning, we will know more than we do now. That is all I am asking.”
David sighed. It was a long sigh. He knew he had already lost the argument before it had even properly begun, and he was choosing to be dignified about the loss.
“Alright,” he said. “But I will sit with him first. You will go and sit by the fire, put your feet up, and you will not argue with me about that one, because if you do, I will fetch Ruth Yoder out here. Even at this hour of the night, Ruth will have a few things to say to the both of us.”
“That,” Jodie admitted, “would be a very fearful thing indeed.”
Eli, who had been standing still in the corner of the room with the wet boots dangling from one hand and a stunned expression on his face, now cleared his throat. “Do you want me to do anything?”
“Yah,” said David. “Go and warm up the soup.”
“Ach, cooking is not really one of the things I’ve learned how to —”
“Go, Eli. Heat the broth. Add more water if it has reduced. Do not, under any circumstances, add anything from the cupboard you are unsure about. If you cannot manage it, fetch your cousin, and she will come and stand over you until you can.”
“Yah, Onkel.” Eli spun around, heading for the kitchen.
He went, with the relieved air of a young man who had just been given a job that, on balance, did not involve any further bleeding of strangers.
Jodie crossed to the cot and bent over the man as far as the curve of her belly would allow.
Wetting a clean cloth in the basin, she very gently, very carefully, began to wipe away the worst of the mud and dried blood from the side of his face.
He did not flinch. His skin under the cloth was warming slowly in the heat of the fire, and the color of him—which had been frighteningly pale in the lantern light by the ditch—was beginning to return in small pink patches across his cheekbones.
Up close, in the steady light of the lamp, he looked even younger than she had first thought.
There was a small, old scar along the line of his jaw, the kind a young boy would likely get from falling off a fence.
His eyebrows were very pale, matching the color of his hair.
His mouth was set in the slack peace of unconsciousness, and Jodie wondered, with a small, unexpected catch under her ribs, what he was doing in Crystal Lake and why he was there.
“Who are you, my freind?” she said quietly, more to herself than to him.
Somewhere behind the closed eyes and the still face, a name stirred. He spoke it once, very faintly, hardly more than a breath shaped into a word.
“Aaron.”
Jodie went very still with the cloth in her hand.
It was the way he said the name that did it.
Not the name itself, which meant nothing to her—there were a dozen Aarons in any given Amish community, and she had known several over the years—but the way he said it.
With a tenderness so bare and so private that Jodie felt, for a sharp moment, as though she had walked in on something she had no right to see.
She looked away from his face, down at the basin, giving him a moment.
“Whoever your Aaron is,” she said softly when she could trust her voice again, “I hope he knows how much you care about him.”
She finished cleaning the wound. It was not as bad as she had feared.
The branch had caught him with a glancing blow, splitting the skin above his ear in a long, shallow line that had bled profusely at first but had not fractured the bone beneath.
She bound it loosely with a strip of clean linen and drew the blanket up to his chin.
David came in with a fresh log for the fire and paused to look down at the man on the cot. “How is he?”
“The wound is clean enough, and he is warming up, but he has not woken. He said a name once, just now, very quietly.”
“Whose?”
“Aaron. That was all.” Jodie hesitated. “I do not think this Aaron is from around here, if he is still here at all.”
David was quiet for a moment. He did not, as a rule, talk about his grief out loud, but Jodie had seen, more than once over the years, the look that came over his face when something reminded him of her mother without warning. It was not so very different from the look he wore now.
“Go and sit by the fire like I told you, dochder,” he said at last, and his voice was gentler than it had been all evening. “I will keep watch. I will wake you if there is any change or if I need anything.”
Jodie was weary, so she did as her father asked.
She did not mean to fall asleep in the rocking chair by the kitchen hearth.
She had only meant to rest her eyes for a moment.
The fire was invitingly warm, and the kettle hissed gently.
Somewhere in the front room, she could hear the low rumble of her father’s voice as he spoke now and again to the unconscious man.
The baby turned once, slowly, then was finally still.
Jodie woke twice in the night. The first time, it was a crick in her neck and the deep ache in her lower back that had become her near-constant companion over the past few weeks.
She got up, stretched as best she could, and went quietly to the doorway of the front room.
Her father was awake in the chair by the cot, his Bible open on his knee but, she thought, not being read; he was watching the stranger’s face.
He looked up when she came in, shook his head once, gently—no change—and waved her back to the kitchen. She went back to the rocking chair.
The second time she woke, it was because the light through the window had begun, very slowly, to turn from the deep flat black to the thin gray of a September dawn.
The fire in the kitchen had burned down to a steady red bed of coals.
Somewhere outside, a rooster was getting himself ready to start his morning ritual.
Jodie sat for a moment with her hands resting on her belly, listening to the house, and then she pushed herself carefully out of the chair and made her way to the front room.
The man on the cot was awake.
He was sitting up, barely, propped on his elbows with his back against the headboard, looking at his own hands. He did not see her at first. Her father, in the chair by the bed, had finally fallen into a light doze, his chin on his chest and his Bible sliding sideways onto his knee.
Jodie stood in the doorway and watched the stranger examine his hands.
“Do you know your name?” she said, as gently as she could.
His head came up sharply, and for a moment there was a flash of something like alarm on his face. Then his eyes—which were green with hazel specks, the color of a speckled trout in the creek water in the sunlight—settled on her face, and the alarm went out of them.
“Lloyd,” he said. His voice was rough from disuse.
He cleared his throat and tried again. “I am Lloyd. Lloyd Kauffman.” He paused, looking back down at his hands as though they might offer him something more, then looked up at her with an expression that was not far from an apology.
“Es dutt mer leed, that is… that is all I have, just now.”
“Ach, it is enough to start with,” Jodie said softly.
She crossed slowly into the room. David still did not stir.
“I am Jodie Schwartz,” she said. “You are in Crystal Lake, Ohio. You hit your head on a branch in my Daed’s drainage ditch last night, which I feel makes you, in some small way, our responsibility.
Would you like something to drink, a kaffe?
You can ask me questions afterward, when you have something warm in you.
” Jodie returned to the kitchen and made herself and Lloyd some coffee.
Offering Lloyd his drink, he looked at the cup. Then he looked at her. And then, very slowly, very carefully, he smiled.
“Denki,” he said. “Jodie Schwartz.”
He said her name quietly—not loudly, not carelessly, but as though it had been put in a safe place, for later. Something deep inside Jodie made her heartbeat speed up almost imperceptibly.
She straightened up rather quickly then, smoothing her apron with both hands.
“I will go and make you some breakfast.”